Oregon needs to stop treating only the symptom of homelessness

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently reported that for every homeless person in America, there are two investment properties sitting vacant.

Homelessness is a complex problem, but there are some aspects of it that are really quite simple. Some of us can afford one, two, three, or more homes, while others among us can afford none. Simply put, rising homelessness is one measure of rising wealth and income inequality in the United States today.

Here’s one metric on wealth inequality that illustrates the connection: the wealthiest top 10 percent of American households owns 76 percent of America’s accumulated wealth, while the bottom 50 percent owns just 1 percent.

For most of us, a home makes up the lion’s share of our accumulated wealth. Among the bottom 50 percent, home ownership is becoming ever more rare. Among them are the millions who lost their homes in the crash of ’08.

When lending reforms followed, they were locked out of the housing market. Meanwhile, the top 10 percent were buying. I myself tried to buy a rental property then, but was just too timid to outmaneuver the bigger fish who were buying investment properties then by the hundreds.

For many working families the future is now a rental. But each year, more and more young renters enter the market, driving rents up. That, of course, is more good news for the top 10 percent.

But for the poorest of the poor, it is bad news. As rents go up, they are driven out of the market and onto a friend’s couch or car or tent, or finally, the street. Wealth and income inequality creates the very rich and the very poor. The poorest of the poor are homeless. Most of America’s homeless are not mentally ill or addicted to drugs. They simply can’t afford rent.

Gross wealth and income inequality is an economic and moral cancer growing at the heart of our society. According to the Oregon Center for Public Policy, Oregonians are not immune to it. Here the top 1 percent of earners takes home more than the entire bottom 50 percent combined.

More than 200,000 Oregon families are now “severely cost burdened” by housing, meaning they must devote more than half their income to rent or a mortgage. These hundreds of thousands are just one crisis away from homelessness. Imagine our streets and parks and underpasses when the next recession comes.

Part of the solution, of course, is more subsidized housing, like the recently completed Fairhaven Gardens. But at a cost of nearly $200,000 per unit, that’s a pretty expensive fix, and a drop in the bucket at that.

Subsidized housing treats the symptoms of homelessness, but not its root cause.

Without tax policies and labor laws that begin to level the playing field and move the needle on income inequality, we’ll never be able to build enough Fairhaven’s to stem the rising tide of homelessness.

Stephen J. Patterson is the George H. Atkinson Professor of Religious and Ethical Studies at Willamette University. Reach him at spatters@willamette.edu